BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Washington Minus the Myth: Ubiquitous but Remote

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: October 26, 2004

In the space of his own lifetime, George Washington saw himself canonized, transformed from a gung-ho fox-hunting Virginia squire into a transcendent symbol of the new American nation. He came to be regarded, Joseph J. Ellis writes in his absorbing new book, as ''the American Zeus, Moses and Cincinnatus all rolled into one'': ''No American had ever before enjoyed such transcendent status. And over the next 200 years of American history, no public figure would ever reach the same historic heights.''

Washington's iconic status atop ''the American version of Mount Olympus,'' combined with his aloof personality, poses a distinct problem for the biographer. He is ubiquitous, yet he is the most remote of the founding fathers: the face on Mount Rushmore, the dollar bill and the quarter; the omnipresent symbol of the nation's birth; and the ultimate father figure for the country. It's a forbidding role, as Mr. Ellis points out, that makes Washington susceptible to the most reflexive Freudian impulses on the part of historians: on one hand, a desire to place him on a patriarchal pedestal assembled from filial encomiums and dubious legends (i.e., the old cherry tree fallacy); on the other, an Oedipal urge to dismiss him as ''the deadest, whitest male in American history.''

As he did in his astute books on John Adams (''Passionate Sage'') and Thomas Jefferson (''American Sphinx''), Mr. Ellis gives us a succinct character study while drawing on his extensive knowledge of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history to strip away the accretions of myth and contemporary extemporizing that have grown up around his subject.

Mr. Ellis refuses to judge Washington by ''our own superior standards of political and racial justice'' but instead tries to show how Washington was seen in his day. In doing so he gives us a visceral understanding of the era in which the first President came of age, and he shows how Washington's thinking (about the war for independence, the shape of the infant nation and the emerging role of the federal government) was shaped by his own experiences as a young soldier in the French and Indian War and as a member of the Virginia planter class. The resulting book yields an incisive portrait of the man, not the marble statue.

Mr. Ellis eloquently conveys the magnitude of Washington's accomplishments: leading the ragtag Continental Army to victory against what was then ''the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world,'' and later presiding over the invention of a viable American nation, a project that at the time was ''a fervent but fragile hope rather than a social reality.''

What remains surprising about the narrative of Washington's life is the supremely ordinary nature of his virtues. He was not a military genius: Mr. Ellis notes that ''he lost more battles than he won; indeed, he lost more battles than any victorious general in modern history.'' He possessed neither the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, the intellectual sophistication of Thomas Jefferson, the effusive charm of John Adams nor the political instincts of James Madison. What Washington did possess in spades was ambition, stamina and the dogged ability to learn from his mistakes. He realized during the French and Indian War and later at Valley Forge, Mr. Ellis writes, that if you can survive, ''you shall succeed.''

Like so many biographers before him, Mr. Ellis points to Washington's self-control and stoicism as his primary traits, but he is not content to simply cite familiar anecdotes commemorating these virtues. He argues that Washington ''was an intensely passionate man whose powers of self-control eventually became massive because of the interior urges they were required to master.''

Indeed many of the central events in Washington's life, in Mr. Ellis's view, involved renunciation: the rejection of his love for Sally Fairfax to marry the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis (whose fortune catapulted him to the top tier of Virginia's planter class); his adoption of a defensive, ''Fabian strategy'' against the British despite his own more aggressive instincts; the symbolic surrender of his sword at Annapolis; his refusal to serve a third term as president; and the dispersal of his estate (including the freeing of his slaves) in his will.

Once again Mr. Ellis reaches to Freud to shed light on Washington's career and legacy. As he sees it, the first president was subject throughout his life to an ''ongoing internal struggle'' that helped him hammer out, ''on the anvil of his own ambitions, his elemental convictions about political power.'' For instance, his insistence ''on a powerful Continental Army and a wholly sovereign federal government became projections onto the national screen of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality; a recognition that he could no more trust the people to behave virtuously than he could trust his own instincts to behave altruistically.'' In other words his federalist vision of government amounted to a kind of national superego, meant to rein in the public's more untrustworthy impulses.

Mr. Ellis concludes that for Washington, ''the American Revolution was not about destroying political power, as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely.'' His life, in the end, ''was all about power: facing it, taming it, channeling it, projecting it.'' This assessment places Washington in the forefront of the realistic tradition in American public policy; he believed that nations would always behave solely on the basis of self-interest and that ideals on their own must never define a government's or military's agenda.

Such arguments are not exactly new but grow out of other biographers' and scholars' writings. Unlike Mr. Ellis's book on Adams, which did much to resurrect that founding father's reputation, this volume does not break much new ground, but it nonetheless provides a lucid, often shrewd take on the man Mr. Ellis calls the ''primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all.'' And it does so with admirable grace and wit.